Software Engineer, Full-Stack

About the role

Monumental is automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction software-defined and autonomous - a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings go up in a single day, with minimal labour.

We're a growing team of engineers, operators and technicians from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and Google DeepMind. It's still the early days of building the company, and this is a chance to make an outsized impact on a problem that matters. From day one, you’ll be working with an experienced founding team, backed by a $32M Series B led by Khosla Ventures and Plural.

Monumental is based in the city centre of Amsterdam, in a beautiful facility with an fully equipped workshop and robot testing floor. We build the whole stack in-house - hardware and software, we're explicitly not a hybrid or remote-first company - you can't build robots or walls from home, so we're onsite five days a week.

Read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn about our vision https://www.monumental.co/our-vision/ and company https://www.monumental.co/about/. You might enjoy our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@buildmonumental, Based in Europe’s film on how we’re fixing Europe’s housing shortage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Q2F0Fcx4A, or this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns.

About the role

We're looking for a software engineer who wants to build full-stack software that can touch the physical world, not another SaaS product. You’ll develop and deploy software that controls fleets of autonomous construction robots. Full stack at Monumental is really full stack, covering everything from microcontroller firmware up to the web-based UI that operators use to control the robots. We’ve built CAD tools for designing masonry structures, path planning and motion control, telemetry and inspection tools, and distributed data storage and sync.

The technical challenges we're solving combine hardware, software, and infrastructure at scale - while maintaining high availability on construction sites. Atrium, our operating system for construction https://www.monumental.co/atrium, is built with TypeScript and Rust. Much of our Rust code is compiled to WebAssembly, allowing our UI to interface directly with the same control code that we deploy to our robots. This gives us a shared stack between real-world deployments and simulated runs in the front-end. You can read about how we control robots with TypeScript in this post by our CTO, Sebastiaan. https://buildmonumental.substack.com/p/plans-as-data

As we're deploying more robots and software, we're always running into new challenges. The problems are often not straightforward: poor connectivity on a construction site because of interference, a memory leak that only becomes an issue after hours of runtime, a robot behaving differently than the simulation. This means a lot of creative problem solving is involved. One of our engineers even traced down a problem to a memory leak in Chrome https://bou.ke/blog/chromium-bug/, which got fixed soon after he submitted a bug report.